How 1994 Explains 2016

On the night of November 8, 1994, in thesmall kitchen on the second floor of the White House, Hillary Clinton stared at a television screen. The 47-year-old first lady, sitting with her husband and daughter, absorbed the news that Republicans all over the country were scoring jolting, overwhelming wins and a takeover of Congress. The rattled, disconsolate Clinton wondered how much she was to blame.

Down in Miami, in a suite in the Crowne Plaza, Jeb Bush stared at a computer screen. Surrounded by his wife, his children, staffers and several reporters, the 41-year-old Republican candidate for governor of Florida had been running for office for 18 months and had been thinking about it for a lot longer than that. He watched the results roll in, showing the state’s closest such race in more than a century. But he knew.

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“I’m going down,” Bush said.

He called his opponent around 11:30 p.m. to concede, then stayed up into the wee hours, smoking his first cigarette in years and drinking Scotch.

Bush lost more than just the election in Florida that night, because his older brother won one in Texas. George W. Bush would get to be a governor, and Jeb Bush would have to wait, upending the family’s expectations and radically scrambling the brothers’ trajectories and presidential prospects.

“Had Jeb won in ’94, he would’ve been the nominee in 2000,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist tells me. Many people I talked to, from politicians to analysts to operatives, say the same thing.

And Clinton’s failure in her zealous efforts at health care reform, hitched to her role in the debilitating Whitewater hassle, made her conservatives’ top target. “I don’t know what’s right anymore,” she confided that year to an adviser. “I don’t even trust my own judgment.”

For both Clinton and Bush, 1994 was a year that looked bad then—but looks worse now. It was a year that changed them, and their lives, forever. It was a year when political opponents learned how to take them on—and win. It was a year when being Bill Clinton’s wife or George H.W. Bush’s son started to feel quite complicated for two aspirants who sought to stand on their own. It was a year, too, in which the new contours of our collective media mayhem began to become clear, with seminal moments in 24-7 news entertainment, reality television and the advent of the commercial Internet, and talk radio rumbling on behalf of Republicans. The far-seeing already were imagining hand-held miracle phones.

Changes in 1994 cracked old orders like the 40-year Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, stoking the kind of anti-establishment fire that’s threatening the current presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush while fueling the candidacies of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump—who were then, respectively, a surgeon in Baltimore, an ambitious executive at AT&T and a New York City businessman trying to climb his way back from almost a billion dollars in debt. In 1994, the notion of Trump, not yet a reality TV-strengthened celebrity, as the most important, most powerful person in the world would have been dismissed as a publicity stunt.

Here we are, though, Clinton and Bush running in a new-rules race, forced to war with Trump and the others while attempting to tamp down the past in the tense, coarse, fast, partisan present.

The year 1994 is a prequel to the election of 2016—and might even decide it.

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She gave up the maiden name she had decided to keep at age 9 so that her husband would have a better chance to be the governor of Arkansas. She took off thick glasses and put in new contacts and started wearing makeup. As the first female partner of Arkansas’ most important law firm, she made more money than he did as the state’s most powerful person. She stayed with him when almost nobody was watching. She stayed with him when almost everybody was watching. She read 43 biographies of first ladies to get ready to move from Little Rock to the White House.

The Year in Hillary | From the rise of the Whitewater scandal to the collapse of healthcare reform, the events of 1994 hardened First Lady Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Republican political opponents and with the press—a tension that was on vivid display during her April “pink press conference.” | AP; Getty Images; Corbis
| AP; Getty Images

As president, Bill Clinton, in large part because she had been so successful heading education reform in Arkansas, put her in charge of massive health care reform all over America.

Early on, she was happy—happier, thought some who knew her well, than she had ever been. This was important policy, and she had an important role. It’s what she wanted. “She made sure from the beginning,” Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, tells me, “that it was viewed as her baby.” She could be a head-down workhorse, buried in briefings and books, and she possessed a self-assurance some believed bordered on righteousness.

By the first week of January 1994, though, her pursuit had all but halted. The Clintons were forced to confront a crisis. Reporters in the right-wing American Spectator magazine, the Washington Times and the Los Angeles Times had reignited talk of Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities, as well as the couple’s potential financial improprieties dating back to a 1970s Northwest Arkansas land development deal on which they lost money. The New York Times and the Washington Post clamored for more transparency from the White House. For the Clintons, this was a critical juncture, politically fraught.

In the West Wing, there were long meetings of advisers and lawyers. On January 4, Hillary Clinton stormed into one of them. She argued against the disclosure of documents. She argued against the initiation of any special investigation. Then her tone shifted, from indignant to shaken. “I’m feeling very lonely right now,” she said, through tears, according to the account in adviser George Stephanopoulos’ book, All Too Human.

It was a year that changed them—a year when being Bill Clinton’s wife or George H.W. Bush’s son started to feel quite complicated.

She had her allies, but ultimately the White House, including her husband, opted for unprecedented transparency. Her instincts, though, this “bunker mentality,” as a senior White House staffer put it to David Broder and Haynes Johnson for their book, The System, made the press only more suspicious, and provided fodder for Republicans to portray her as a secretive operator. All of it made it difficult for her, and everybody else, to focus on health care reform.

In late January, before the president went on CNN’s Larry King Live, five days before the State of the Union, aides briefed him on substantive issues, but also on “tabloid” issues that he might be asked about—the rich brothers named Menendez who had killed their parents, the woman named Bobbitt who had cut off her husband’s penis, and the burgeoning, pre-Winter Olympics fixation on who had surreptitiously whacked the knee of a figure skater named Nancy Kerrigan.

In Texas, finishing up her memoir, slated for publication in September, Barbara Bush wrote, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly very much a part of her husband’s decision-making process. She seems much the stronger of the two. Does it make him seem weaker? I am afraid that when problems or controversy occur, and they will, the finger will be pointed at Hillary.”

In Northern California, as Apple in Cupertino developed something called eWorld, which the company said would bring “electronic information within reach of millions of people across the globe,” MTV readied for five months of filming in a flat in San Francisco. The third season of the reality TV series titled The Real World was scheduled to start airing in June. From some 25,000 people who wanted to trade their right to privacy for the chance to be on TV, producers had handpicked seven with disparate backgrounds and views, attempting to gin up the sorts of arguments that would make for a good show.

One member of the cast: a 22-year-old, gay, HIV-positive Cuban-American from Miami named Pedro Zamora.